I tried bending it into a circular shape, but it would only go so far before I could hear the fibers begin to strain, the first hint of an impending crack and eventual break. So I let up on the pressure.
The question was, how far would it bend once it was soaked?
I stuck it in the water until it was mostly submerged. Then I went back to transferring rocks in and out of the water.
Lelia arrived soon with the hide, along with Hala, who had been working on scraping it and wanted to know what exactly the hell I was up to.
“Thanks,” I said as I took the hide and stuffed it into the water.
Water overflowed the top and sloshed out the side, but both the hide and the stick were now completely submerged.
“What do we do?” Lelia asked.
“We wait,” I said as I continued swapping out rocks.
We waited until it was nearly dark to take out the hide – a good six hours – which was now waterlogged with hot water.
“Try to take off the fur now,” I said to Hala. “Hurry, before the water freezes.”
Hala pulled out her bone tool and went to work.
The hair came off about five times easier than before, leaving behind almost completely undamaged skin behind it.
“What!” Hala said excitedly as she scraped.
Lelia had the intonation down a bit better.
“Whaaaat?!” she exclaimed.
I laughed as the two women went to work removing the fur.
The water was starting to freeze in the open air, though, so they had to keep dunking it back down into the tub to get it pliable again.
Meanwhile, I pulled out my hardwood stick.
Time to see if a good soak had made any difference.
I bent the rod –
And it completely stretched around in an oval loop with no creaking or cracking whatsoever.
“YES!” I cried out triumphantly.
Lelia and Hala looked over at me in surprise.
“Why so happy?” Lelia asked.
“Hold on,” I said, and pulled out a string from the furry deer hide we had made back in the cave before we left.
I lashed the ends of the stick together, then triumphantly held up a teardrop-shaped curve of wood.
“Ta-daaaa!” I said happily.
“What is ‘ta-daaaaa!’” Lelia asked, repeating my vocalization and tone exactly.
“It’s what you say when you do a magic trick!”
“Cock magic?” Lelia asked.
Hala giggled.
“NO, not cock magic,” I said, grinning. “Just regular magic.”
Lelia frowned in confusion. “What is regular magic?”
I was going to have to practice pulling a coin out of her ear to try to demonstrate.
Too bad I didn’t have a coin.
Maybe an orange berry…
“Never mind,” I said. “It’s the frame for a snowshoe!”
She looked at it dubiously. “Will it work?”
“Only one way to find out, babe.”
Once the new hide was completely bare, we covered the embers of the fire with rocks to keep them smoldering overnight, then walked the quarter mile back to camp.
I took the snowshoe frame back with me and set it on a pile of rocks by the main campfire to dry out as much as possible. The women did the same with the hide, stringing it up on a crude frame so the heat could dry it out.
When I checked the snowshoe frame the next morning, the wood wasn’t entirely dry – but it had kept its oval shape, even when I undid the string that kept both ends together.
YES!
From that point forward, we switched from an arrow-making assembly line to a hide-tanning and snowshoe-producing assembly line.
Half of us would go out hunting with our bows and arrows. Lelia, Fieria, and I were the best shots by far, so the hunting usually fell to us – although once all the bows were finished, the entire tribe and I would go out hunting to improve our chances. No more than two days would go by without one of us bagging a deer.
Once we had a hide to work with, two women would swap out rocks at the hollowed-out stump (where the water had turned to ice overnight) until the water was warm enough to soak the hide.
I also cut a supply of sapling sticks, and the women would soak those, as well.
At the end of the day when the hunting party returned, we would strip the hide of fur, and I would lash the flexible ash rods together to create teardrop-shaped snowshoe frames. Then we would let the hide and frames dry out overnight by the fire.
Then the women would tan the hides with the deer brains and smoke them to remove the rest of the moisture.
After the hides were done, another women would use my knife and cut the hide into long strips.
They actually fought over that particular chore. My steel knife blade was so technologically advanced that they were fascinated, and actually argued over who got to use it.
Once I had enough strands of flexible hide, I set to work creating snowshoes.
I would carve notches in the frames so that the strings wouldn’t slip. Then I would tie one end of the string as tight as possible to one notch… string it across the frame… and tie it tightly again. If there was enough length, I would double up and retie it on the other side.
I also fastened wider, flatter pieces of hardwood to the tops of the snowshoe frames. They were a hell of a lot more comfortable than the round branches I’d been using as a base for the sole of my boot – and they allowed me to maneuver the snowshoe easier, too.
After about twenty pieces of string going lengthwise and widthwise across the frame, I had what looked like a crudely made, ugly-ass tennis racket with two wooden slats on top of one side.
But it worked.
The first time I lashed it to my boot, the improved snowshoe worked orders of magnitude better than the crappy ones we’d started with. They kept me balanced atop the snow better, and I could move three times as fast without stumbling around as much.
I waited until I had two finished
